10/29/08

10/27/08

I can't believe the weekend flew the way it did. We learned several things this weekend:

having family help you paint makes painting go by MUCH faster.

garlic-stuffed olives make really good painting rewards

we underestimate EVERY task

Don and Ruthanne helped paint on Saturday, and they are the fastest, quietest little workers I've met. It was like a scene from a movie, where everyone just works, with a backdrop of music. A little creepy in person, but very effective. The second bedroom is completely painted. Now we have hallway and office walls, bookshelves, trim, cubby doors....... I can't count down all the work left, but we're getting there.

AND, we had chicken soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner twice over the weekend. If that's not blogworthy, I don't know what is.

I don't think we've worked in the basement without a whopper of a story (in our own eyes, anyway.) We started last night ambitious but realistic. Set small, attainable goals, grabbed some beverages. There was crawling into storage areas, there was trim that we painted. We even did laundry. (Well, Karen did laundry. We can't forget this, now can we?) And we started out pretty good. Got a lot accomplished for a short night after work. But then I somehow knocked over my beer. I was working in the cubby hole, crawling and painting (mostly getting paint on me, by the way) and I must've bumped something, cause my bottle splashed the new wall, and covered the top of the cabinet. No biggie, every great ship has a christening, perhaps our basement walls were the same. Grabbed a diet coke, put it on the washing machine below the newly painted cave I was working in, and crawled back in. After a few minutes, Karen came through to inspect praise my work, and offered to grab us beer. She placed it on the floor, a good distance from both of us, and we worked. Two minutes later, we heard a strange noise... While the washing machine was finishing its spin cycle, a can had fallen and sprayed diet coke all over the place. Karen (kind girl that she is) cleaned it up since I was a cave-dweller now, and as she did so, guess what her foot toppled over. Yep. Beverage number three. So, we have learned a few things. 1.) If you paint a very small area, your neck will hurt from bending to avoid paint in your hair. 2.) You will have paint in your hair regardless. 3.) No matter where you put your drink, it will either spill on its own, or be knocked over. And, 4.) taking pictures of all this makes it awfully fun to recap. :)

carrie: oh, the '80's called
carrie: they want the term reboot back
me: wtf am i supposed to call it?
carrie: restart like the rest of the world
me: people don't say reboot?
me: where have i been?
carrie: unless of course you're working on your commodore 128
me: mine's a commodore 64
carrie: well, then, reboot away

We began painting the ceiling of the lower level this weekend. We went to Home Depot Saturday to get supplies, and left the work for Sunday morning. Found out it's not exactly as easy as we figured. We spent about two-and-a-half hours painting, edging, extending and rollering (as well as moving the furniture from one part of the room to the other.) About halfway through what we did finish, we pondered hiring someone to finish, stopped to eat a snack and watched part of Almost Famous. I am very good at diversion, especially when it comes to actual manual labor.

My plan is to finish the rollering this evening. Updates to come tomorrow, and perhaps even pics. (Though, it's hard to tell the painted from the non-painted.)

'We could argue over whether "intelligent design" should be taught in our schools as an alternative to evolution, and overlook the fact that the rankings of American schools have already dropped to twenty-first in the world in the teaching of science and twenty-fifth in the world in the teaching of math. We could argue over whether or not the McCain campaign had sufficiently vetted its candidate for vice-president, but take at face value the campaign's description of that vetting as "an exhaustive process" including a "seventy-question survey." Most people in those countries where they still teach math and science would not consider seventy questions a particularly taxing assignment, but we could forget this. Amnesia was our preferred state.'

10/13/08

After creating the two universes several bilion years ago, Tarvu came to Earth (Erbu) inside an egg as a tiny baby (weighing just three pounds four ounces) and landed in the middle of the ocean (there is some dispute as to which ocean he landed in). He was rescued by a family of octopuses, who taught Tarvu how to swim, how to hunt and how to disguise himself from predators (in later life, he was to become a master of disguise). Tarvu survived on barnacles and octopus ink. Tarvu lived like an octopus in the ocean until he was nine. At that age, his adopted father, Oobu the Octopus told him (in Octish) that he was ready to come on to dry land and join the human race.

On August 28th 2008, the day before the third anniversary of the storm, the controversial British, urban guerilla graffiti artist Banksy travelled to New Orleans
His plan: to hit the place fast and have his easily recognizable stencil based works in place to commemorate the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

10/8/08

The basement drywalling should be done today, which means we have an upcoming weekend of cleaning and painting. In case you missed the invitation earlier, we will be having a HUGE PAINTING BONANZA!!! (Somewhere, someone is unable to properly punctuate his posts, since I've taken all the uppercase letters and all the exclamation points.)

Beer and pizza will be provided for all who join us, as will fun and stories you can tell for years to come.

10/7/08

'Feldstein began his project in 1984 with a simple idea: Snap photos of all 676 residents of Oxford. He typed up letters in April that year and delivered them to every home, most of the time taping the notes to the back door.
...

Brianne Leckness is one of 100 people featured in this project.

She was left on the steps of a church by her mother when she was three years old.

Two decades later, Feldstein set out on a new quest -- to rephotograph as many people as he could find from 1984. But this time he brought along Stephen G. Bloom, a University of Iowa journalism professor, to interview the residents and record their life histories.'

10/6/08

10/5/08

Washing dishes, she dropped one of the glasses from the Fat Cat Uncommon Goods collection. The red guy.

The collection is no longer available.

This plea goes out to all you savvy interwebs users. If you can find one for sale (a single glass or the whole collection,) send me the link, and I will package up and send you Phoebe something very cool.

Breakfast at First Watch, we have a three minute wait for a table. We sit, people watch, and who walks by but Del Donahoo? I mention how lucky I am that I bring my camera everywhere, and Karen's response is 'You are not going to take a picture of that poor man with his family.' I say, no, and feel a little silly for even thinking that I could sneak a pic. We are then seated, directly next to his table, and I am facing him. Karen sits down, completely unaware. I am notoriously bad at hiding anything, so giggly, I tell her how pretty she looks today. She thinks I'm making fun, and I say 'no, I might even need to take your picture here.'

I wait for the perfect moment, trying not to look like I'm taking the poor man's picture while he's with his family. I pull out the camera, and Karen, remembering how cute she is today, has decided that she 'will be studying' for the picture. I can barely hold the camera steady, proud of myself that she still doesn't know that I'm not really taking her picture. --snap-- I'm chuckling, she asks if she looks silly, so I show her the picture, and point out how lovely she looks, and how lovely Del looks over her shoulder.

The day started with the decision of where to go to avoid the HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE CONSTRUCTION NOISE. We lived through a few hours of it yesterday, and I gotta say, at 9am, the pounding, clanking, compresser-noise covered by blaring heavy metal was making my ears bleed. After breakfast, looking for a place for K to finish her homework quietly, I suggested Starbucks. I found a gift card from last Christmas (thanks, Doug) and it's been in my wallet ever since. Two driveways from breakfast we found one, and it only took me five minutes to maneuver the 500' distance. I realized, laughing, that I didn't bring my wallet, which had the gift card. Whoops. Fine, we'll get something to drink, plop down in the silence on the interwebs, and chill out for an hour. We're there for a few minutes when I realized that their WiFi had a charge, and credit card numbers would have to be entered for timeblocks, (um... am I being punked?) so I was playing in Photoshop. I hear a jazzy version of a song I know from Elvis Costello, so I shove my little tidbit of knowlege to Karen.

'This was originally done by Elvis Costello, 'Love for Sale.'
Karen points out that it sounds like it's probably the original, and maybe Elvis covered it.

Blink. Blink, Blink.

I say no! (please add your own eye-rolling with a condescending tone.) NO! This is probably his new wife, the jazz singer, covering it. A few minutes went by, and then some grinder machine started to do it's best impression of the HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE CONSTRUCTION NOISE. Seriously? It seemed like ten minutes had passed, but the sound stopped. Karen turned the page in her homework, and realized that she needed the internet to finish. We headed home, defeated.

We're watching Casablanca for Karen's film class, and early into the film, she joked that 'this is an Elvis Costello song' and she laughed and laughed and rolled her eyes (and so I stabbed her.) About four minutes later, lo and behold, what song is the bar piano player playing? Yep. 'Love for Sale'

10/3/08

The drywallers come tomorrow, and we have a huge task ahead of us. We were planning for their arrival and completion before this weekend, and had figured we'd paint Saturday and Sunday. Now we're delayed a weekend, and are planning for October 10th. Carrie, (and Mike, and Will, and anyone else who feels a compulsion to assist us in our plight) please consider this a sincere invitation to join us in Cleveland for pizza and beer and laughs and games and monkeys and, oh yeah... lots of painting. (Okay, maybe no monkeys, but we've got connections; we'll see what we can do.)

10/1/08

The first official night of my living in the condo, we were quite productive. We cleaned up the demo area, threw all the scrap wood out the window (either into the dumpster or at the nice neighbor-man who smiled and cheered us on.) This is where we got REALLY productive. We trawled for a new camera for Karen. We drank imported beer. We watched television. We reheated pizza. We downloaded music. We read the Times Magazine. What we neglected to do, however, was the Spanish homework that is due tonight.